


Day #4: Stupidity

by bookishandbossy



Series: Fitzsimmons Week [4]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: F/M, Post-Finale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-11
Updated: 2014-08-11
Packaged: 2018-02-12 18:02:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2119515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Or, how two brilliant people can be incredibly stupid.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Day #4: Stupidity

If Leo Fitz is a certified genius, how can he be so unbearably stupid?

Three months after waking up from a coma, two months after leaving the hospital, one month after being cleared to be back on the new Bus, one week after Coulson let him go out into the field, he was out on a mission with Trip, dismantling some HYDRA center, and Jemma Simmons had never been this angry. “I can’t believe that they let him go.” she fumed. “I can’t believe that he thought he could go.”

“He’ll be fine, Simmons.” Coulson said from somewhere behind her and she almost whirled on him too before Skye coughed loudly and unconvincingly in warning. Instead, she stomped out of the room and to her bunk, where the sound of British curses and a series of faint thumps could be faintly heard through the wall. “She threw something, didn’t she?” he frowned, puzzled as to how his elite agents had somehow turned into teenagers. Simmons was sulking, Fitz and Trip were inventing some elaborate video game in the basement when they weren’t eating huge amounts of food, and Skye…Skye was the same as she always had been.

“She still can’t get over the fact that she’s in love with him.” Skye said matter-of-factly from her corner, peering over the edge of her laptop. “For people so smart, they’re remarkably good at being stupid about each other.”

Several hours later, Jemma sat on her bunk and, leaning her head against a newly dented wall, wondered exactly the same thing. She had always been so very good at being good, at coloring within the lines and following each rule down to the last perfectly ordered substep. Do x, get y. Only now x seemed to produce a whole new set of letters and numbers and Roman numerals, a haze of what he’d meant, and what she wanted, and then what that meant, and what would change and what wouldn’t. And, worst of all, if he even remembered what he’d told her. The days after he woke up were a blur of tests and treatments and a series of doctors pulling her away from him. Then he was in physical therapy and everything was simply about him getting better, each tiny step of progress overshadowing everything else. Once he was back on the Bus, their time in the lab was a desperate scramble to keep a step ahead of HYDRA with limited resources and even more limited time. He hadn’t even told her that he was going into the field: Coulson had relegated that unenviable task to Skye, who’d promptly backed out of the room when Jemma had snapped the delicate instrument she was holding in two.

Jemma Simmons didn’t get angry, she reminded herself. She reasoned through a situation with calm and logic until she arrived at a mutually beneficial situation. She definitely hadn’t thrown the Dalek he’d given her against the wall until the blasted thing stopped shouting “Exterminate”. Except she had. And when Fitz came back, muddy and bruised and beaming, she refused to come out of her bunk like the moody sixteen-year-old she had never been. And when he peeked his head around the corner of her door and said hi in his best puppy-dog voice, she threw reason and logic out the window and said in what she hoped was her best scathing voice, “You nearly killed yourself for the second time in three months. I hope you’re happy now.”

“Jemma, I’m fine. Trip got loads more bruises than me.” he protested, edging into the room. “The doctors cleared me and everything.”

“The SHIELD doctors are idiots. And so apparently are you.” she snapped at him. “Three months after you get pulled up from the bottom of the ocean—”

“I’m recovered! I told you, I got cleared by half of SHIELD. Everyone on this bloody plane had to examine me ten times before they let me get out of bed to make a cup of tea.” he snapped back. That was when he noticed that his hand was shaking again and he braced himself against the wall of the bunk, breathing deeply and praying that she wouldn’t notice. Which she did, because she was Jemma and Jemma noticed everything when you didn’t want her to.

“You almost died!” she kept on glancing back at his hand, even after it stilled. He’d forgotten to take his meds this morning, she realized. The tremors could have started up again, he could have been unable to run, he could have been caught…and suddenly she was back on the wrong side of a glass waiting room, pleading with the doctors to let her in until she went hoarse from screaming and could only press herself against the glass waiting for him to wake up. Back with the choking fear and the despair that had paralyzed her for days in that waiting room as she tried to see her way into a future without him. “After what you stupidly, stupidly did, I thought that you were never going to wake up.”

“Is that what you’re mad about? That I decided to save your life?” Fitz was still trying to keep voice low, but his accent was getting thicker and he was digging his hands into the pockets of his sweater, warning signs that she used to know but no longer cared about.

“Yes, actually. Yes, I am mad. I am absolutely furious.” She raised her voice to a high enough pitch that Skye and Trip peered into her door. They didn’t even get to their question before she slammed the door in their faces. “You were in a coma for days. Did you forget that too?”

“So you’d rather still be on the bottom of the ocean.” Fitz folded his arms across his chest, the stupid stubborn Scot.

“It’s not about that, you idiot.” she hissed. “It’s about the fact that you decided I could live without you! You knew—you knew, don’t you dare deny it—what losing you would do to me and you did it anyway! So you made your stupid, bloody heroic sacrifice and you never asked me what I thought about it, if I wanted to live the rest of my life knowing that my best friend died for me. You never even thought that we could both make it out, so you were going to leave me and you just keep on leaving me.” she was screaming now, screaming until her vocal chords ached from the strain. “Do you know when we last talked, Fitz? Really, really talked? I don’t either and I swear to God that if you leave me one more time—”

“I’m in love with you!” he had to shout to be heard over her and they both fell silent for a moment. “I’m in love with you and you obviously don’t love me back. We were dying at the bottom of the ocean and the only way I could think to tell you was to give up everything for you. How could you have ever thought that I wanted to leave?”

“How could you ever think that I didn’t love you back?” she demanded, color blazing in her cheeks. She hadn’t meant to tell him this way, she hadn’t meant to tell him at all, but she was too angry to tell him anything but the truth.

“And ever since I woke up, you keep on looking at me like I might break, like I’m not Fitz anymore, just another one of your patients and” he stopped, blinked, blinked again in the sudden quiet. “Jemma, what you just said…you love me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Oh.” his mouth dropped open, hanging there until he shut it with an audible click.

“You’re still an idiot.” she added. It was then that it sunk in. He loved her, she loved him, and they’d just been shouting about it loud enough to be heard through the entire Bus. She lowered her voice to a fierce whisper. “You went on a dangerous mission only a week after you’d been cleared, with little to no backup and the world’s worst extraction plan if anything got wrong, and you’re an absolute idiot!”

“But I’m the idiot that you love.” Fitz smiled, just enough to make a dimple appear in his cheek, and she had a sinking feeling that he would tease her about it for the rest of their days. “I’m thick as a post, a dimwit, a fool, absolutely barmy and you love me anyway.” Then she kissed him. Mostly to shut him up, partly because there was nothing else left to do, and really because she wanted to. She pinned him against the wall, grabbing handfuls of his shirt, and kissed him until they were both breathless, her tongue sliding over his lower lip and his hands tight around her waist. Jemma only let go when she remembered that she was supposed to be furious.

“That doesn’t mean I’m not still mad at you.” she gasped afterward and threw her door open before she kissed him again. He could only nod, dazed, and stumble outside to catch Skye with her ear pressed to the bunk.

“Skye, what are you doing?” he asked hazily, his tongue tripping over the words.

“She kissed you, didn’t she?” Skye grinned in triumph. “Trip owes me another twenty bucks.” And with that, she swept off, leaving Leo Fitz to lean against Jemma’s door grinning like the idiot he was. And he may have been guilty of occasional stupidity, he thought, but he’d made the most brilliant decision of his life the day he fell in love with Jemma Simmons.


End file.
